Jedediah Smith was born in upstate New York in 1798 but
raised on the Pennsylvania and Ohio frontier. At age twenty-four
he
joined St. Louis fur trader William H. Ashley on a trip up the
Missouri to the mouth of the Yellowstone River and he spent the
remainder of his short life trapping and trading in the far
west. After returning to St. Louis in 1830 he was killed the
next year on a trip to Santa Fe.

Expedition of 1826-1827

Smith spent almost a year on this journey, leaving Great Salt
Lake with fifteen men for a trapping and trading expedition on
August
22, 1826. The trip is summarized in this letter of Smith and the
first of the two journals by his companion Harrison Rogers, (see
AJ-116).

Starting from an established fur trade rendezvous site at
modern Laketown, Utah, Smith's party passed southwest through
lands belonging to the Ute, Paiute, and Mohave nations and
reached the Colorado River in early October. Crossing the Mohave
Desert, they reached the Spanish mission of San Gabriel, near
present-day Los Angeles, the following month, where they spent
the winter (see AJ-116 Rogers’ journal of this winter residence
in southern California).

Because the Spanish would not let Smith trade in their
coastal settlements, he traveled north up the central valley of
California before climbing through the Sierra Nevada Mountains
at the end of May. The party, crossed Nevada close to the route
of modern-day U.S. Highway 6 and entered Utah near present-day Grandy. The
party reached the rendezvous site near Great Salt Lake again in
July, 1827.

Expedition of 1827-1828

After this trip, Smith and Rogers immediately retraced their
route with another group of traders. but half were killed before
they reached California. Smith, Rogers and the survivors
continued north from California into Oregon and up the Pacific
Coast, where all but Smith and three others were killed. The
journey from California to Oregon is described in the second of
Rogers’ two journals (see AJ-116). Smith made it to a British
trading post at modern Vancouver, British Columbia, and then to
the Missouri country.

Document Note

Two primary sources about Smith’s explorations are presented
in documents AJ-112 and AJ-116. The first is a letter Smith
wrote in 1827 to William Clark (1770-1838; see AJ-100 and AJ-146
to AJ-149), leader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and, in
1827, U.S. Superintendant of Indian Affairs. This letter details
Smith's overland route from Utah to southern California and
back; its original manuscript is at the Kansas Historical
Society. The other primary source on this expedition is a
journal kept by Smith’s companion Harrison Rogers during their
winter residence near Los Angeles (see AJ-116).

Other Internet and Reference Sources

The best online source for further information about Smith,
Rogers and their travels is the “Mountain Men and the Fur Trade
Virtual Research Center” at
http://www.xmission.com/~drudy/amm.html which contains dozens of diaries, narratives, and letters of
their contemporaries It offers books, maps, pictures, email
discussion groups, and links to other sites on the Web related
to the history of the fur trade in the far West during the early
nineteenth century.

The standard books about these events are George R. Brooks,
ed., The Southwest Expedition of Jedediah S. Smith: His
Personal Account of his Journey to California 1826-1827
(1989) and Leroy R. Hafen and Harvey L. Carter, eds.,
Mountain Men and the Fur Traders of the Far West (1982).